A software provider can sell a number of different software and/or service products. For example, a software provider can sell subscriptions to customers for the software and service products. An entity that has purchased a subscription to a product is an owner of the subscription. An owner's use of a subscription can be represented, for example, as an “entitlement.” For example, a customer, such as ACME Company, purchases ten 3-year subscriptions to Enterprise Software ABC and thus, ACME Company is an owner of the ten subscriptions. Ten entitlements represent the ten subscriptions. An owner can then assign the ten entitlements, for example, to various systems. When the owner installs the Enterprise Software ABC on a computing system, the computing system is granted one of the ten entitlements.
Once a computing system has been granted an entitlement, the computing system is registered and subscribed to receive software content from the software provider for the duration of the subscription. For example, a computing system granted an entitlement by ACME Company receives software content from Enterprise Software ABC for 3 years if ACME Company purchased ten 3-year subscriptions to Enterprise Software ABC. Once the subscription expires, the entitlement also expires and will no longer be valid, and the computing system will no longer receive software content from the software provider. A user of the computing system will no longer be able to use the software or service once the entitlement has expired, and a break in coverage may be experienced.
Conventional solutions can require a system administrator to determine which computing systems have entitlements that have expired. The system administrator must then manually select subscriptions (if available) to use to grant an entitlement for each computing system with an expired entitlement. Once a subscription has been selected by the system administrator, it can be used as an entitlement for the computing system in order to provide access to the software for the computing system. Using this manual process, a break in coverage can be experienced by a user of the computing system while the system administrator obtains a new entitlement for the computing system. Moreover, having a system administrator manually select subscriptions may be feasible when there are a small number of computing systems. However, the manual selection can be difficult when there are a large number of computing systems.